The Man With the Golden Arm (19 page)

And the old days before the old days, when burlesque was still burlesque, Kenny Brenna was the funniest man in town and the streetcar men got salt out of the box down on Augusta Boulevard to melt the ice in the switches. Down on Augusta where they’d played the same games other children played in less crowded neighborhoods – but had played them with little vicious twists unknown to luckier stubs. They’d played Let Her Fly simply by wrapping up garbage from the nearest can and sneaking up on a privately selected opponent with it: one who never knew he was anyone’s opponent at all until the garbage hit him in the teeth. For the game’s single rule had been that the player at bat was anyone with garbage in his hand who had voice enough to call out, ‘Let her fly!’ before pitching it. The kid who didn’t duck fast enough lost right there.

Rules had been added and the game extended but you still had to be ready to duck every second. ‘Jacks check, the bullets say a buck,’ he intoned unemphatically, hearing his own voice going on and on like a voice belonging to somebody else. ‘King sees, a buck to you Jacks, Jacks bump a buck, Big Ace sees ’n here we go, down ’n dirty, when you get a hunch bet a bunch, nothin’ to it if you know how to do it – turn ’em over when you’re down – man with the hammer bumps a buck, Jacks call – one bucket of paint all red – a winner every hand, hooked it in the dark he says well well, slip me a half ’n make me laugh, thank you, the more you bet the more you get—’

The old days, the old ways, before all the stoplights turned to red and there was still time between deals for a laugh or two over a nickel beer.

‘He ain’t even got his first papers ’n he got a City Hall job,’ somebody complained of somebody else and the night was long, so long, and all night long the derisive little diamonds mocked the fat and happy-looking hearts. And the sour spades, that had seen too much of everything and had been disappointed in it all for so long, stood aside with cynical indifference while the murderous black clubs ambushed the hopeful four flushes and the foolishly faithful four-card straights; while the little old gray deuces died, heartbroken, by the way. Till the green silk bag was filled and emptied, half secretly, half guiltily, as a thousand green silk bags had been filled and emptied secretly before. And were always brought back for more more—

As this night followed a thousand nights and these men followed a thousand hopers who had sat here before them to go down to their graves holding a four-card straight in one hand and would never be remembered at all. Their mouths were stuffed with race-track dust; and no one to remember at all.

Their sons had taken their places, passing the time, while waiting for death to deal one from the bottom, by drawing to aces and eights. Their hell was a full house that never won and their last hope of heaven a royal flush.

‘He got a loaf of bread under his arm ’n he’s cryin’,’ somebody said of somebody else. While the biggest sucker of them all sat in the dealer’s slot till morning, getting relieved fifteen minutes every two hours, and thought and thought and thought. For every time he was relieved his newly recovered confidence slipped an inch. And the old regret, like the old wound fever, struggled in him to kindle fresh flames of guilt. Guilt that burned like so many small strange flowers putting out petals of fire in place of leaves. ‘I told her in the hospital I was gonna make it all up to her. I’m makin’ it up to her awright. Just one flight down. Through a different door.’

‘What’s it mean when a dealer’s hand gets shaky?’ Louie asked Schwiefka without looking at any dealer at all.

‘That’s the first sign of insanity,’ Schwiefka decided.

‘Hell, it’s the last sign,’ Frankie threw them both, out of sheer irritability. ‘I blew my stack a long time ago settin’ right here watchin’ tinhorn West Side gamblers tryin’ to make a pair of bullets out of one little acey.’

‘Don’t give
me
that old
kapustka
,’ Louie ordered him. ‘You ain’t the guy to be rememberin’
anythin
’.’

‘Okay,’ Frankie conceded with his hand around the deck, ‘maybe it’s time we both started forgettin’, Louie.’

Louie nodded and held his peace. ‘The price just went up on you, Dealer,’ he told himself confidently. ‘That
stuff is gonna be awful hard to get around the middle of next week.’

‘Deal, deal,’ Schwiefka demanded uneasily, sensing something old, unspoken and violent in the air, and the players all began wheedling the dealer at once. ‘Give us somethin’ to remember you by, Dealer – we’re gettin’ quartered to death here.’

‘Toward morning the farmer gets lucky,’ Frankie assured every farmer present. And the cards went around and around.

Thus in the narrowing hours of night the play became faster and steeper and an air of despair, like a sickroom odor where one lies who never can be well again, moved across the light green baize, touched each player ever so lightly and settled down in a tiny whiff of cigar smoke about the dealer’s hands.

Now dealer and players alike united in an unspoken conspiracy to stave off morning forever. Each bet as if the loss of a hand meant death in prison or disease and when it was lost hurried the dealer on. ‘
Cards, cards.
’ For the cards kept the everlasting darkness off, the cards lent everlasting hope. The cards meant any man in the world might win back his long-lost life, gone somewhere far away.

‘Don’t take it hard, your life don’t go with it,’ was the philosophy of the suckers’ hour.

But each knew in his heart, when he said that, that he lied: each knew that his life was reshuffled here with every hand.

Till the last fat red ten had been dealt, the final black jack had fallen, the case deuce hadn’t helped after all and the queen of spades had been hooked, by somebody, just one hand too late.

‘If it hadn’t been for me – if it hadn’t been for me—’

And the last discouraged sucker had thrown in his cards to the biggest sucker of them all.

‘What’s right is right,’ Frankie decided as the last hand was dealt around, ‘you can’t go smashin’ up a woman ’n then make a fool of her on top of it with another woman. A guy got to draw the line somewheres on how bad he can treat somebody who can’t help herself no more just account of him.’

Walking home with Sparrow where the long arc-lamp shadows slanted across the snow-wet walk, as on any lost corner at 4
A.M
., they heard a switch engine’s burdened coughing.

‘Trying to get up steam,’ Sparrow whispered as confidentially as if he had just had it straight from the engineer.

But to Frankie Machine it sounded more like a man trying to cough with a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. One breath to the second, no more and no less, as the hairy little paws tightened about his shoulders to get set for just one more ride. Under the shoulders, deep in the stomach’s pit, some tiny muscle like a small cold claw probed upward toward his heart, didn’t quite reach it and contracted again, leaving the heart fluttering with anxiety for the whole stomach to turn over: he retched, wanted to vomit and had nothing to vomit at all. That small cold claw would reach again, in its own good time, as mechanically as he himself could shuffle a cold deck at will. It would reach. It would get there and he’d fight it down.

It was just so damned hard to fight alone, that was all, with so little to fight for. A half pint of good whisky would keep it down until he could get to sleep; but only for an hour. Then he’d waken and no whisky would do him good in that hour. He’d need Molly-O to hold him then. It would be Molly-O or a quarter-grain fix, he’d never make it alone.

Every time he got sick lately it seemed the damned punk was on his heels, staring at him through those foggy glasses, trying to pretend he didn’t know a junkie when he saw one. Why didn’t the little chiseler speak out?

At the corner of Damen and Division he turned abruptly on Sparrow. ‘Which way
you
goin’?’ Just like that.

‘Why – home, Frankie. Same as you.’

‘You tellin’ me where I’m suppose to go now?’

Sparrow saw Frankie’s face then, peaked with suffering in the arc lamp’s feeble glow, and wanted to help and didn’t know how and didn’t want to understand.

‘I got business.’ Frankie let him have the edge of the knife turning in his breast. ‘Case out.’

Twice now within the week Frankie had turned on him like this, he was beginning almost to expect these sudden changes, meaningless and swift. With no further word the punk turned, feeling there was no place for him in any joint on Division Street, nor in the whole wide world, without Frankie Machine.

Shuffling down the shadowed street, Sparrow hoped a squadrol would pick him up just so that he could feel, for ten minutes, that he was going
somewhere
. He wanted to feel walls and safety about him, needed to be
inside
something. Frankie had been his wall and the wall was gone, leaving him as defenseless as he had been in the years before he’d hooked up with the dealer. When he reached Paulina he realized Frankie must be kidding, wanting to teach him a lesson for something, making him walk just to see how far he’d go before looking back – Frankie would be standing there waving to him to come back and get shoved around, pretending he was mad about something – Sparrow turned with swift hope.

But no one waved in the arc lamp’s feeble glow for any punk’s returning.

No one stood waiting under any arc lamp for any lost sparrow at all.

Something tugged just hard enough at her foot to waken her; the army blanket had fallen across her toes. Yet she sensed
a secret message in being awakened so: someone was trying to tell her she must not sleep tonight.

Down both sides of Division Street the occasional arc lamps burned and it was late, so late, there should be a light step on the long dark stair and someone to cry out that the night was too long.

And come up to wheel her a little while.

Whatever time it was, he was long past due. Unless there were two kinds of time in the world these days: Gamblers’ Time and Cripples’ Time and cripples must now set their watches by gamblers.

All her life, it seemed in this winter hour, he’d been standing her up somewhere. This time would count against him like the others, not one time would be forgotten. He’d go to purgatory with what he had done to her on his soul and she’d sit there then just as she sat here now. He wouldn’t be getting rid of her in the hereafter, if there were any sort of justice at all, any easier than he could get rid of her on West Division. And wondered cloudily how she’d get the chair into purgatory. It would be shipped right along with her best clothes, she supposed, and the Special Dispensation showing she really didn’t belong in purgatory herself, she was just there to make sure that that Frankie Majcinek paid off.

‘He’s fixed me so’s I can’t have no kid,’ she pitied herself for the thousandth time, ‘that counts against him just as much as if he’d killed somebody. He
got
to be fait’ful now ’r he won’t even get as high as purgatory,’ she assured herself confidently, and a twinge of perverse pleasure took her, twisting her lips into a loose and sensual line. ‘A man just
got
to stick by a wife who can’t stand on her own two feet five minutes at a time,’ she felt with the same sense of a long-stale triumph.

For if she’d made a secret bargain with herself, in that darkened corner of the mind where all such bargains are
made, she would stand by the deal. She was bound now by it as irrevocably as Frankie was bound to her and she was bound to the chair: she would not now return to that corner except in dreams. Not to that curtained hide-out, not to that secret place. She had gone to that bookie in the brain where hustlers’ hearts pay off to win, place or show. She had bet her health on a long one and waited each night to be paid off in her turn.

A door slammed downstairs and the Jailer’s voice, heavy with sleep, called down irritably, ‘No rooms! Too early! Go by Wieczorek and sleep on pool table!’

But still no hand on the door below. No step on the long dark stair.

Nor ever yet had wondered why she dreamed, so often with the same deep dream, of a distant cousin, a girl of nineteen who had died in Sophie’s childhood. She saw Olga in a nun’s habit walking down a long white corridor. It was night, the whole great hospital was still: only the faint sweet smell of anesthetics and the sound of the nun’s slippered tread. Sophie saw the girl, all in white and immeasurably far away, as though looking through a minifying lens. The lens turned in her dreaming brain, a narrow dark door opened and her own face, like a face seen under water, the eyes wide and brimming with joy: ‘Olga! Honey! Look! I’m on my feet again!’ She was crying for happiness in that dark door and wakened with a sob breaking like a small bone in her throat.

Then the sense of loss that deepened as wakefulness widened, till the whole world seemed one great room wherein she had lost something long ago, something so dear, so dear. ‘Why should I worry?’ she asked herself suddenly, with a certain self-derision. ‘I got mine.’

That was, seemingly, true enough. She had got exactly what she had wanted more than anything else in the world. Frankie Majcinek. Had him forever and for keeps and all for her very own. For there was no other place in the world
for him, since the accident, save this one small furnished room. So now it was time to feel her victory in her heart, sweeter than all the dances she had missed through that perverted victory.

Then why did it feel as though the all-night movies had all been emptied, why did it feel they must be showing broken reels to empty rows and that the all-night bakery fires had gone out: that the loaves would grow cold and mold slowly to dust in ten thousand rusting stoves?

Why did it feel so late, so late that she would never get there in time after all?

‘It’s just the way things would be if that Nifty Louie was God ’n Blind Pig was Jesus Christ,’ she decided feverishly, ‘it’s just about the way them two’d run things.’